“Not many exhibitions turn the history of the world upside down,” said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Silk Roads” at The British Museum, however, is just such an event. This ambitious show explores the myriad ways in which “Asia, Europe and North Africa shared their cultures more than a millennium ago”, arguing that, far from “developing in isolation” during the so-called “Dark Ages”, these disparate regions were connected by busy trading routes that were used to transport far more than just silk and other precious goods – indeed, that they enabled a remarkable exchange of knowledge, skills and beliefs across the known world.
The exhibition focuses on the period between AD500 and AD1000, bringing together more than 300 treasures dating from the era to demonstrate how people and their ideas moved across Eurasia with far more ease and regularity than was previously understood. Taking the visitor from “fabulous oases” and “desert palaces” to “synagogues, mosques and burial mounds”, it is a “mesmerising” achievement.
The exhibition’s geographical reach is truly bewildering, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Stretching from Japan and the Korean Peninsula to Britain and Ireland (“supposed backwaters” at the time), it argues that there never was a single Silk Road linking East and West. Rather there were multiple routes, by sea and land, by which many goods, ideas, religions and diseases were exchanged.
Certain exhibits bring the subject to life: one is an “unassuming” statuette of Buddha, “about the size of a clenched fist”, probably carved in Pakistan’s Swat Valley in the 7th century but unearthed among Viking treasures on an island in a Swedish lake. Nevertheless, as a thesis, the idea that “people used to trade a lot with other people, who lived elsewhere” – is rather “banal”. It makes the show too broad and unfocused, with captions providing only “absurdly abbreviated historical synopses”. Overall, it feels like an attempt to reinterpret the distant past “as a reflection of our own globalised self-image”. I found its “multicultural mantra” unconvincing.
The history “went over my head” at times, said Laura Freeman in The Times. “Himyarites? Ctesiphon?” But the objects here tell their own fascinating stories. You can see some of the earliest known chess pieces, found in Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan: the game probably originated in India, before spreading along the Silk Roads to the Islamic world and Europe.
There are Tang dynasty treasures: these were found in a 9th century ship that was heading from China to Arabia before it sank in the Java Sea. You learn along the way that Byzantine silk was worn on the Steppes; that garnets from what is now Pakistan were dug up at Sutton Hoo. This “epic” exhibition can be exhausting, but it’s a pleasure to encounter “such a caravan of beautiful, unusual, intricate objects”.
The British Museum, London WC1. Until 23 February